In Focus | Europol

With the speed and ubiquity of the internet, you can order most anything these days. And among the things you can procure—as the European Union’s investigative consortium Europol has discovered—is crime. Wil van Gemert, Deputy Director of Operations for the law enforcement organization, calls this phenomenon “crime as a service” and says there are about known 5,000 organized crime syndicates in Europe that are more than happy to provide it. Here, Gemert talks with Frederic Lemieux, Pd.D., Faculty Director of Georgetown’s graduate programs in Applied Intelligence and Cybersecurity Risk Management, about how the internet has benefitted both criminals like these and the 28-nation consortium that is trying to stop them.